


you should put your tulips against mine

by ToFightOrToFlee



Category: Fairy Tail
Genre: Accidental Flirting, Alternate Universe - Flower Shop, Blossoms, F/M, Flirting, aka natsu's a florist who only sells snapdragons and lucy's reluctantly charmed, and later their relationship WHEEZE, budding friendship, but accidentally, flower shop au, i guess you could say, natsu: growing flowers is my passion, they're in a wheeze, we all think he's adorable let's be honest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:27:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26056465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ToFightOrToFlee/pseuds/ToFightOrToFlee
Summary: Wherein Lucy wants to buy flowers for her mother's grave and Natsu is the supremely unhelpful florist.
Relationships: Natsu Dragneel/Lucy Heartfilia
Comments: 8
Kudos: 51





	you should put your tulips against mine

**Author's Note:**

> thanks to my sister for inspiring me, you're epic :)

Lucy steps through the glass door and listens to the welcoming bell chime with an easy smile, breathing in the scent of flowers and earth. She’s always loved how plant stores feel like tiny, hidden worlds inside a concrete jungle, flourishing with greenery and life that’s so unlike the city around them. She’s tried to grow plants of her own, but her little apartment isn’t the best place for a garden. Her plants always die within the week.

Though her dog Plue might also have a hand in that. She’s come home to find saplings and soil scattered around their pot a good few times and Plue with dirty paws. He doesn’t even have the decency to be ashamed about it.

She lets the door swing shut behind her, taking a few steps and looking around with bright eyes. There’s rows upon rows of brightly-colored flowers, ranging from pure white to deep scarlet. The tables the pots sit on reach to her waist and the flowers themselves to the tip of her nose and higher, concealing the rest of the shop behind them like a wall of vegetation. They’re haphazardly organized, flowers of similar colors mostly bunched together, but she can spot a few outliers scattered about. It’s aesthetic in a slightly wild, chaotic way and she adores it on sight.

She doesn’t recognize the flowers right in front of her, but she doesn’t particularly care. She already knows what she wants, so she tears her eyes away from the tree-shaped plants and to the counter near the door.

There’s nobody behind it.

“Um, excuse me?” She glances around again, wondering where all the employees are. “Anyone here?” She was sure the jingling door bell would’ve gotten someone’s attention, but she hasn’t seen a soul. She’s starting to regret her belated decision to buy her mother flowers when she was only a few blocks from the graveyard. She hadn’t wanted to walk all the way back to get flowers from her usual store, so she’d ducked into the closest one.

Now, she’s wondering if she should duck right back out and resign herself to either walking a mile back and forth in heeled boots for flowers or visit empty-handed. As pretty as the shop is with its big windows and recently-watered flowers sparkling in the light and fancy flower pots, she doesn’t want to waste time standing around in an empty store. Her mother’s waiting for her.

A few moments later, the bell chimes again when she goes to leave, and it’s only  _ then  _ she hears a voice call out to her.

“Hey! Wait a minute, are you leaving already? You didn’t even get anything!” She pauses in the doorway and turns, eyebrows rising when she hears something crash. There’s a curse, and a few more seconds pass before someone steps out from behind the wall of flowers.

The first thing Lucy sees is hair. Soft, pink, and unruly, fitting in almost too perfectly with the flowers. She’s pretty sure she can see a few petals tangled up in it, too. She meets a pair of wide, smiling eyes, faded green with long eyelashes and thin (pink! must be natural, then) eyebrows. His cheeks are puffed out like a chipmunk’s, the right one marred with a thick scar. When she glances down, she sees his hands cupped together, holding a clump of dirt and a budding version of the red tree-shaped flowers. The noise must have been him knocking it over. His clothes are excessively stained with dirt, save for a spotless white scarf with black stripes around his neck. 

As she watches, he tips his head back and swallows, his tongue darting out to lick the last of the crumbs away. Once he’s finished, he grins with every white tooth showing.

“Sorry I didn’t get to ya before, it’s my lunchtime!” he says. She finds herself smiling back as she lets the door close, both relieved and mildly annoyed. At least he’s cute, she thinks, though he’s not even close to what she was expecting. It’s a struggle for her to not gawk at the muscles showing through his open vest.

How does a  _ florist _ get to be that buff?

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it. I just got a little impatient. Are you the only one working today?” He barks out a laugh, shaking his head, and she nearly laughs along with him before she stops herself. It’s charmingly contagious.

“I’m the only one who works here,” he tells her. “It’s my shop! I started it all by myself and I work all by myself. I grow all the flowers by myself, too! And it’s my house.” A pause. “I sleep in the attic.” Another pause. He shifts the flower to one hand and holds the other out to her, dirt showering his sandals. “I’m Natsu!” Years of having manners drilled into her has her taking his hand without a thought. It takes all her mental strength to not immediately yank away from his dirty, sweaty grip. It takes even more to keep smiling and not wince at how enthusiastically he shakes her hand. It’s like he’s  _ trying _ to make her arm fall off.

“I’m Lucy. Nice to meet you!” When he lets go, she tries to discreetly wipe it off on her skirt. As endearing as he is, she’s eager to hurry and get going. When it looks like he’ll open his mouth again, she speaks up. “So, uh… Natsu. Could you make me a bouquet of, oh, maybe seven white lilies? White or pink paper is fine, but could you make sure the ribbon is… um.” She falters when she sees the blank expression he’s giving her, feeling her face start to heat. Did she say something stupid? It’s the same order she always gives the shop closer to her apartment. Maybe it’s different in one-person stores like this?

“Sorry, Loopy. I only got snapdragons,” the boy says, lifting the flower in his hand, and she blinks. “It says so on the sign outside! Didn’t you read it? I worked hard on that.” He pouts. She didn’t read the sign, actually.

“I’m-”

“Besides! Snapdragons are  _ cool! _ Why would you want anything else?” He’s smiling again and it feels like a physical slap to her brain. “And I don’t have bouquets, whatever those are. I have ribbons if you want them, but I don’t have paper.” Lucy quietly lets that sink in for a few seconds. The sheer honesty in his eyes is enough to convince her that no, he’s not joking with her. She isn’t sure whether to be disappointed, impressed, or amused.

“How do you get any business when all you sell is one kind of flower?” she finds herself saying. She promptly wants to take it back, horrified and ashamed that she’d say something so rude to someone she just met, but Natsu only laughs and walks past to the shelf of empty pots behind her.

“You’re kinda dumb, aren’t you?” he says over his shoulder. 

Her shame dissipates. Offense quickly replaces it.

“I don’t have one kind of flower,” he continues before she can defend herself, standing on his toes to reach the smaller pots on the higher shelves. “There’s lots’a different kinds of snapdragons! There’s sonnet snapdragons, Tahiti snapdragons,  _ la bella _ snapdragons… oh! And candy showers! Those ones are my favorites. I think you’d really like  _ madame _ butterflies or royal brides.” He faces her again with another toothy grin, palm-sized pot in one hand and flower in the other. “And I got almost all of them! Lots’a people like snapdragons, but not as much as me!” He brushes past her again, and this time, she curiously follows after him.

Despite herself, she’s  _ interested. _ She’s never known much about flowers aside from which ones were appropriate to display on the dinner table, which ones went in the hallways, and which ones belonged in the carefully maintained garden they showed off to their guests. Besides, in terms of frivolity, she prefers gems and pearls to flowers.

The boy’s passion must be rubbing off on her.

He crouches behind the first wall of snapdragons, setting the pot down on the floor. She peers over his shoulder as he scoops handfuls of soil off the floor from the fallen pot, picking out broken pieces of clay as he goes and carelessly tossing them aside. She hopes he plans on sweeping that up later, especially since he’s wearing sandals. Once he’s scraped up everything he can, he digs a small hole in the middle of the pot with his fingers before placing the little flower inside. He straightens up again, and she takes a hasty step back so he doesn’t headbutt her in the jaw.

She gets a noseful of floral scent when he shoves the flower into her face.

“Here! I don’t have any lilies or that paper you wanted, but you can have this instead. It’s not all grown yet, so you’re gonna have to buy a bigger pot and soil and stuff if you want it to get bigger and not outgrow this pot.” She somehow ends up with the flower pot in her hand, and Natsu hurries off behind another tall row of snapdragons, returning a minute later with a bigger pot under his arm and a bag of soil tossed over his other shoulder. 

“Hang on, I don’t-!”

“I can give you some real basic tips, too!” he goes on as he shoves the pot and the soil into her arms. She stumbles at the weight, and suddenly, the muscles make sense. If she carried around things like this every day, she’d probably be ripped by the end of the week. “They like lots of sun, but a little shade is okay, too.”

“I’m not-”

“I usually water mine in the morning, and I water them a lot, but not enough to make ‘em leak out the holes on the bottom. And don’t water the blooms! You have to water the soil, ‘cause otherwise the flowers get all droopy and heavy.”

Lucy resigns herself to the fact that he won’t listen to a single word she says, closing her mouth and starting to nod along. She can feel her eyes glaze over.

“This one’s a  _ madame _ butterfly, by the way! It’s probably gonna get about two feet tall. Three if you take real good care of it. And they’re my favorite color!” He seems to (finally) run out of steam, giving her a smile without teeth. It’s softer than his other smiles. Probably because she can’t see his very prominent canines. “I hope you like it. ‘Cause if you do, then you’ll come back and I can see you again!”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” Lucy snorts, still mentally reeling. She doesn’t know if she’s retained a single bit of advice he pelted her with. That, and she can’t tell if he meant to sound as flirty as he did at that last part. “I wasn’t really looking to buy any of this today, and I’m terrible at keeping plants alive. My dog always digs them up if I don’t kill them myself.”

“Yeah, Happy used to eat my flowers all the time,” Natsu says with an understanding nod. “He’s my cat! Wanna meet ‘em?”

“I think I’ll pass.” She gives a short, breathy laugh. “Can you take this stuff back? I can’t carry it all the way back to my apartment, I’m not that strong. I don’t have a car or anything, either, and I don’t live nearby.” He hums, taking the bigger pot from her and dropping it on the checkout counter.

“Well, where do you live? I can bring them over to you after I close up,” he offers, and he sounds so genuine it almost isn’t creepy. She shakes her head again.

“Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll just ask one of my friends to drive me over some other time.” Unintentionally and heavily implying that she’ll come back when she has no reason to. She hasn’t gotten a single thing she wants from this boy, she doesn’t owe him any of her time or money. That’s what she’s trying to tell herself, at least.

“Great, that works! I’ll save these for you so nobody else buys ‘em before you come back!” He moves the pot to the floor, nudging it under the counter with his foot. “And don’t worry about paying for that. It’s a present ‘cause you’re a new customer!” He points to the sapling in her hand.

“Aw, thank you.” She smiles, a little touched despite her exasperation. She feels like she’s been loitering in this shop for hours, and she really wishes he’d stop beaming like he’s trying to outshine the sun because it makes it really hard for her to think about leaving and not coming back. “That’s really sweet. I don’t even know if this thing is gonna survive, though.”

“Just do what I told you and it’ll be fine!” Natsu waves his hand dismissively. “Oh, and since it’s a present, can’t forget this!” He jerks open one of the drawers under the counter, digging through it and pulling out a long, mildly tattered piece of blue ribbon. He walks back to her, tying it into a lopsided bow around the flower pot with a playful smirk. He jabs a finger towards her head. “It matches the one in your hair, see?”

“Oh, it does?” Lucy touches the bow holding up her hair with her free hand, giggling quietly. “Thanks, Natsu. I’ll do my best to take care of it. I’ll make you proud!”

“That’s the spirit!” He roughly pats her shoulder, leaving dirt stains on her shirt. She tries not to mind too much. “Keep me updated, ‘kay? And tell me if you think it’s getting lonely! I have lots of other flowers that can keep it company. You’re gonna have to pay for those ones, though.” He snickers, then spins her around, pushing her towards the door. “Now get outta here, you’re holding up the line!”

“What line? We’re the only ones in here!” she scoffs, but lets herself be booted outside anyway. She’s been here far too long, and she doesn’t even have the bouquet for her mom she wanted to show for it. Still, she can’t complain  _ too _ much. She got a free flower and met a cute boy. She’s sure her mother would understand. 

“See ya, Looney! Don’t forget what I said! I hope you get your paper!” He waves at her like she’s not three feet away from the shop, and she rolls her eyes, but ultimately waves back.

“It’s  _ Lucy," _ she corrects, “and thanks, I guess! I hope so, too.” He keeps waving until she can’t see him anymore, and once she turns the corner, she lets out a gusty sigh. She can’t quite stop her lips from turning upward as she glances down at the snapdragon in her hand. “What a weird guy.”

**Author's Note:**

> she stops by to say aloe every time she visits her mother :D  
> soon enough she realizes she's pollen for him :D  
> she can't be-leaf how fast she fell in love :D  
> their relationship blooms beautifully after she confesses :D  
> she just thinks he's iris-istible :D
> 
> i'm so sorry


End file.
